Those Darn Crows

This week I had a very eye opening experience. I was able to join Tom Ryan and Stacey Vigallon in a walk-through of the Least Tern exclosure. We walked inside the exclosure, looking for possible nests, eggs, and scrapes. Scrapes are little ditches that the Least Terns dig out in the sand where they plan to lay their eggs. We saw many scrapes and a lot of Least Terns flying around and courting. We also saw some eggs, but sadly they were all cracked by the crows. I saw how much of a factor crows are to the success of the Least Terns. I’ve heard about it, but now that I saw it first hand, crows are a big problem. We are hoping that enough Least Terns lay eggs at the same time so that the crows are not able to eat them all. One thing that they are trying is putting electric eggs in the exclosure. The eggs look just like the Least Tern eggs but when the crows bite into them, they get shocked. Hopefully the crows will fear the eggs enough to stop eating the real Least Tern eggs. We are going to do another walk through this coming week and hopefully we see more eggs intact.